"But where does this come from?"
"Don't ask me! Scotland, also, perhaps; here we are!" She pulled up sharply before a cabin by the road, and, before he could take the reins she threw down, sprang out.
Lawson sat feeling like a chagrined schoolboy. It was one of the small accomplishments of which he was proud, to lift a woman from carriage or saddle. He had strong muscles well trained, and he had a fashion of putting his hands at the woman's waist and giving her a lift, quick, light, and sure, and setting her on her feet with a look of pleased astonishment in her eyes; now he sat holding the reins like any good boy and watching the flutter of a blue skirt around the clusters of zinnias and marigolds by the cabin corner. And then he heard voices and laughter and the squawks of terrified chickens.
Frances was coming back—a colored woman, with a bunch of chickens in either hand, walking by her side. He listened to the woman with intense amusement.
"Why don't you say thanky?" she was demanding.
Frances only laughed.
"I done tole yuh how pretty yuh is; now why don't yuh say thanky?"
"She ought to, that she ought," called Lawson from the trap.
"Hi, honey!" cried the delighted darkey, "is dat him? La, chile, now he suttenly is a nice beau!"
"Aunt Roxie," said Frances haughtily, "put the chickens in the back of the trap. You're sure you've got them tied all right?"
"'Co'se I is!"
Lawson, delighted with Frances' discomfiture, was fussing about, helping the colored woman.
"Jes lissen at her, jes as mighty as you please," she muttered to him, and then quite loudly, "some folks suttenly is hard to please; yuh praises dem, dey got nutten to say; yuh praises de beau an' dey looks mad!"
"Never mind!" cried Frances, "never mind! I'm not going to bring you any tobacco next time I come!"
"La! Miss Frances, what mattah long yuh now—yuh know—hyar, chile, lemme pull yuh some dese hyar flowers; de fros' done totch dem anyhow!"
But Frances was not listening; she was off fast as her horse would trot, the chickens squawking indignantly, and Roxie by her zinnias and marigolds gazing in open-mouthed astonishment. Lawson was shaking with laughter. He was even with her he felt, and perhaps a little ahead. He was sure he was ahead when, just outside the University gate, one of the chickens, freed after much straining, fluttered under the edge of Frances' skirt and shrieked a loud and triumphant squawk. Frances sprang to her feet; but for Lawson she would have been out and under the wheel. There was no laughter about that young man for one swift instant, when he threw his arm out, pulled her back into the seat and snatched the falling reins. The danger past, he caught the offending fowl, fluttering now in the dash-board, handed it gravely to Frances and then, without a word of excuse, leaned back and laughed until the tears were in his eyes.
As for Frances, she was white, she was cold. She had been frightened for the first time in her life into a silly deed. She was mad through and through, but it was useless. Under that ringing laugh all else gave way; she must join in it.
"Never mind," she declared, when Lawson drew rein outside the quadrangle and lifted her out impressively. "I shall have that chicken for supper."
"I'm coming to help eat him!"
"Come on!" she called gayly, as she disappeared along the walk to the campus.
II
Frances lingered in the dining-room after dinner was done. She pretended to be rearranging the flowers on the table; in reality she was thinking what to say to the little, spare, bent colored woman who was busily clearing away the dishes.
"Susan," she began, "I think I'll make a cake this afternoon."
"Dyar's half a one hyar now," grumbled Susan with a flash out of her dark eyes that were like live coals in the wrinkled face.
"And—ah—I thought I'd make some floating island."
"La! chile, what yah gwine pester roun' de kitchen for ter-day?"
Susan had taught Frances the mysteries of cooking and was inordinately proud of her pupil's skill, but she wanted it practised when it suited her; and that afternoon had a vision of rest and mending.
"And," went on Frances, to finish now that the subject was broached, "I got those chickens right out the coop. Roxie says they are nice and fat. That Dominico now, how would it do to have it smothered?"
Susan wheeled on her. "You's gwine hab company to suppah?"
"Y—e—s!"
"An' yuh wants to hab smothered chicken an' floating island an' cake an' eberything else I'll ben' my po' back to cook?"
"Your smothered chicken is always so good!" wheedled Frances, who had managed Susan ever since she could talk.
"Why don' yuh say so den, jes say yuh's gwine hab company to suppah an' be done wid it."
"Well, we are," laughed Frances, "and I want everything good, like you always have it."
"Hm!"
But Frances was contented and was gone.
"Wondah who 'tis now?" Susan's eyes, black and still as ink pools in her yellow, wrinkled face, looked dreamy as they often did when she thought of Frances. As long as she was blithe and content so was her faithful care-taker, who had nursed her father when Susan was a child of ten, and he was a bad infant. She had married and had her own cabin and her own children when fortune freed her. She had seen her "old man" and her children die, all of them, there in the cabin in the mountain-side, except one boy, Bill, and he had gone off to Baltimore; and she had been glad in her heart when "Marse Robert" and his bright-faced young wife had driven out to her home back there and asked if she would not come and live with them. Susan locked her cabin door and looked up and down the view of misty valley and purple mountains she had looked on for so many years, and then went with them gladly.
But the cabin she kept. She would rent it to no one, she would not sell it. It grew weather-beaten and rotten; the sage and mint and bergamot were choked with weeds. But whatever Susan had lived of her own life had been lived there. She had been happy, she had been miserable; she had worked in gladness, she had worked in despair. She had borne children, she had seen them die, in those four log walls.
The joy, the sorrow of that cabin were hers, and she would keep its memories. No rude touch of alien life should spoil them. She put the big key of the door in her pocket and went to be part and parcel of "Marse Robert's" life; the flame of her devotion to him burned but brighter as she stood by him when his daughter was laid in his arms—as she stood by him, ten years after, when his wife closed her eyes on life and closed his heart on life's keenest joys.
She had watched his daughter with a delight that knew no limit. Over most of the negro race beauty holds a potent sway; and had Frances been less fair, her saucy independence would have been Susan's pride.
"Nebbah see her hangin' 'roun' wid dem stujints," said Susan to herself, as she finished her work in the dining-room, "Yuh sees 'em dribin' through hyar sometimes, de young men an' de ladies, and de ladies dey's fair sickenin' er hangin' on to ebery word; an' long 'bout closin'-up time"—which was Susan's expression for "Finals"—"den 'tis fair scanderlous. But Miss Frances—hm—she gib em jes as good as dey sends, an' she r'ar her haid up in de air, an' I tell yuh now she's got one pretty haid to r'ar up, sho's yuh born!"
"I's gwine see who's comin' hyar dis ebenin'," she ruminated. "Miss Frances she don' nebbah 'vite much company nohow; 'tis Marse Robert mos' always. I's gwine see who dis is, I's gwine watch 'em, sho."
And so she stood in jealous guard over the supper of the professor and his daughter